Description

Milo Hastings: City of Endless Night. (New York:
Dodd, Mead and Co., 1920), first edition, 346 pages, black cloth
with white lettering on spine and front board, 12mo (5.25" x 7.5"),
dust jacket (in protective Mylar). Milo Hastings was an interesting
American character. He was health-conscious at a time when American
men were not health conscious, inventing Weeniwinks, a health-food
snack; yet he was addicted to cigarettes. He invented the
forced-draft chicken incubator, but never reaped the rewards for
his invention, as the patent was awarded for a similar invention.
First serialized in True Story Magazine as the "Children of
Kultur" in 1919, City of Endless Night remains the work for
which Milo Hastings is known. Sam Moskowitz, lifelong super fan of
science fiction, once wrote that City of Endless Night was
an "unusual work, filled with uncanny prescience about impending
events...born out of the experience of World War I and the impact
on Americans of imperial Germany's statist creed, which believed in
the subjugation of the individual for the sake of the nation. On
all counts of inventiveness, social significance, narrative flow
and intrinsic worth, it ranks with When the Sleeper Wakes by
H.G. Wells, Messiah of the Cylinder by Victor Rousseau and
We by Eugene Zimiatin, all written and published about the
same period." The copy presented here is in very good condition,
with light age-toning to the edges, minor edge, corner, and spine
wear, and slight shelf-cocking to the spine. The dust jacket is
good, with some rubbing, and chipping around the edges, especially
at the head and tail of the spine. Still, this is a rare work from
a truly American character. From the Ventura Collection.